Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Chicken hero

Here's a good news story to start the new year from a local television station in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Guardian has video.MILWAUKEE – A Wisconsin couple says clucks, not fire trucks, helped them escape a blaze at their home.

Dennis Murawska, 59, said a pet chicken named Cluck Cluck woke his
wife Susan Cotey, 52, with loud clucking from its cage in the basement
two floors below about 6:15 a.m. Thursday. The couple's two cats also
were running around the main floor.

Murawska said he had been half awake but didn't know about the fire
because the smoke alarms hadn't gone off. He realized something was
wrong when his wife got up.

"The chicken gets quite vocal when she gets excited," he said.

Cluck Cluck came from a nearby farm in Alma Center, about 135 miles
east of Minneapolis, Murawska said. When the chicken began wandering
over to his house, his neighbor said he could kill it because it wasn't
producing any eggs. But Murawska felt sorry for Cluck Cluck because she
had a mutated foot and decided to keep her. He fed the bird and built a
coop, and then his wife let Cluck Cluck into the basement on cold
nights.

"I spent way more money than I ever should've," Murawska said by telephone. "I guess it paid off."
The couple escaped, and firefighters found the chicken in its cage
and one of the cats alive in the basement. Another cat hasn't been found
and is presumed dead, Murawska said. The couple and their surviving cat
checked into a Black River Falls hotel, while Cluck Cluck is staying
with the neighbor who used to own her.

Alma Center Fire Chief Jeff Gaede said the fire started in the attic
of the attached garage and was not suspicious. The house was a total
loss, but it could have been worse -- if not for the chicken.
"We are used to hearing about a dog or cat or something, but we never
heard of a chicken waking up a resident for a fire," Gaede said.
"That's pretty amazing."

The story of Cluck Cluck, a hen whose loud cries alerted her
grateful family to a fire in their Wisconsin home on December 28, thus
enabling them
to escape, has resounded around the world. Reporters love
this story, and rightly so! But Cluck Cluck’s Heroism with its Happy
Ending and
shower of praise also echoes the cries of tens of millions
of chickens and turkeys on farms throughout the United States whose
clamor upon sensing
a fire in their houses is totally ignored by their
owners, who refuse to install even minimal fire protection equipment,
claiming it would
cost too much. They prefer to let the birds burn alive and
collect the insurance and taxpayer reimbursement from the U.S.
Department of
Agriculture. On Dec. 20, 2012, 25,000 turkeys burned to
death on a farm in Virginia. Last May, 500,000 hens burned to death on a
farm in Colorado.
Last June, 14,000 turkeys burned to death – 7,000 in North
Carolina and 7,000 in Minnesota.

When we learned in July 2012 that the National Fire
Protection Association, “the authority on fire, electrical, and building
safety,”
had proposed an amendment requiring all newly-constructed
farmed animal housing facilities to be equipped with sprinklers and
smoke control
systems, and that the agribusiness lobbies had successfully
joined forces to defeat the proposal, we filed our own Appeal and gave
testimony at the
NFPA’s Meeting on the proposal on August 7 in Quincy,
Massachusetts.
Though the agribusiness lobby won the first round, we will
continue to fight for a NFPA provision mandating that fire protection
equipment be
installed in all farmed animal housing facilities. Nothing
shows more starkly their total lack of compassion and accountability
than the refusal of
farmers and farming corporations to install basic fire
protection equipment in the buildings they trap their animals in. If the
alarm cries of one
single hen could be heard two floors from where the
Wisconsin family lay sleeping, imagine the sound of many thousands of
birds trapped in their
cells, and nobody listening as they scream, burn, and
suffocate to death together.

About Me

As a professional journalist, I began writing about heritaqe poultry after my daughter and I acquired our first chickens in the 1980s. Voyageur Press invited me to write How to Raise Chickens in 2007, followed by How to Raise Poultry in 2009. New editions of both were published in 2013 and 2014. The poultry book covers ducks, geese, swans, turkeys, guineafowl, game birds and ratites as well as chickens.
Traditional breeds are the best choice for small flocks. I continue as a regular contributor to Backyard Poultry magazine. I serve on the American Poultry Association's Flock Certification committee.